inomanoms
Eye of Cthulhu
I'm assuming, that everyone that has ever played Terraria has had that dream, or at least the ego: "I am going to make the best base the world has ever seen". Or maybe not, since I'm addressing a T-MEC audience; people who get more of a kick out of the pure mechanical challenges of the game. 
So here is a building thread. Where does it find it's place at T-MEC?
@ZeroGravitas recently posted to some very interesting articles in his make-an-NPC-battle-arena thread. Of particular interest to me was the imgur article on how housing area is determined by a fill pattern, and how this fill pattern can be abused to create infinite NPC housings or very compact 3-tile wide NPC cells.
The thing that stood out to me in the examples of that article, is that while the 3-tile wide NPC cells achieved high horizontal compression, the area requirements for housing left large regions in each NPC cell inaccessible and unused. I set out to make more a more compact building by integrating these squandered spaces into circulation. Here is my result:
The housing is based on a module of a 7 by 6 tile NPC cell (including bounding walls) connected to 7 by 5 tile section of corridor in the vertical orientation, or a section of corridor of a variable amount to accommodate the overall building grid in the horizontal orientation. There are module variants for corridor above, below, to the left and to the right of the NPC cell. Yes, Ino loves his modules.
In coming up with this system, I went through numerous NPC cell variants. What slimmed down the competition, was the ability to tile the modules in 2 dimensions, while maintaining access to NPC on both sides of a corridor.
To be able to talk to an NPC, he/she cannot be more that three tiles away from the player. So, for as in this example, the NPC is inaccessible from the hallway without jumping.
The NPC cells all have a teleporter. This is foresight for an NPC shuffler/cycler that I am planning. The large yellow region in the center is intended for crafting and player spawn. This build assumes a bare minimum of essentials, so no silly trophy rooms and biome specific crafting stations are to be taken out of chests as needed. I am unsure of whether this build would float in the air or be placed on the ground. What do you guys normally do?
The astute observer will notice there are only 20 NPC cells, although the game has 22 house-able NPCs. I generally don't consider Santa an NPC, so that leaves 21, or an an odd number of NPCs and I thought I'd handle this problem by housing the guide in the open crafting space in the center of the build. Another solution would be to forgo the vertical shafts at the top or bottom of the build to gain the space I'd need for an extra cell.
One strange phenomenon that I came across while playing around with NPC housing is that furniture seems to have an effect on whether housing is valid or not. The following cozy example is valid,
but if the torches are replaced with lanterns in the NPC cells, it suddenly isn't anymore. This is one of many confusing examples I came across, others being changing the placement of a torch from the side to the center of a room turning a housing invalid. Obviously, there has got to be more than just total "free space" at work here. Leave it to Terraria to convince you, you understand how things work, and then prove you wrong.
I would greatly appreciate any feedback on my build or general advice you can give from your experience for making housing.
Did you know there is a TCF called "No More Wood Boxes"? Pshhh... I love boxes. Meow
So here is a building thread. Where does it find it's place at T-MEC?
@ZeroGravitas recently posted to some very interesting articles in his make-an-NPC-battle-arena thread. Of particular interest to me was the imgur article on how housing area is determined by a fill pattern, and how this fill pattern can be abused to create infinite NPC housings or very compact 3-tile wide NPC cells.
The thing that stood out to me in the examples of that article, is that while the 3-tile wide NPC cells achieved high horizontal compression, the area requirements for housing left large regions in each NPC cell inaccessible and unused. I set out to make more a more compact building by integrating these squandered spaces into circulation. Here is my result:
The housing is based on a module of a 7 by 6 tile NPC cell (including bounding walls) connected to 7 by 5 tile section of corridor in the vertical orientation, or a section of corridor of a variable amount to accommodate the overall building grid in the horizontal orientation. There are module variants for corridor above, below, to the left and to the right of the NPC cell. Yes, Ino loves his modules.
In coming up with this system, I went through numerous NPC cell variants. What slimmed down the competition, was the ability to tile the modules in 2 dimensions, while maintaining access to NPC on both sides of a corridor.
To be able to talk to an NPC, he/she cannot be more that three tiles away from the player. So, for as in this example, the NPC is inaccessible from the hallway without jumping.
The NPC cells all have a teleporter. This is foresight for an NPC shuffler/cycler that I am planning. The large yellow region in the center is intended for crafting and player spawn. This build assumes a bare minimum of essentials, so no silly trophy rooms and biome specific crafting stations are to be taken out of chests as needed. I am unsure of whether this build would float in the air or be placed on the ground. What do you guys normally do?
The astute observer will notice there are only 20 NPC cells, although the game has 22 house-able NPCs. I generally don't consider Santa an NPC, so that leaves 21, or an an odd number of NPCs and I thought I'd handle this problem by housing the guide in the open crafting space in the center of the build. Another solution would be to forgo the vertical shafts at the top or bottom of the build to gain the space I'd need for an extra cell.
One strange phenomenon that I came across while playing around with NPC housing is that furniture seems to have an effect on whether housing is valid or not. The following cozy example is valid,
but if the torches are replaced with lanterns in the NPC cells, it suddenly isn't anymore. This is one of many confusing examples I came across, others being changing the placement of a torch from the side to the center of a room turning a housing invalid. Obviously, there has got to be more than just total "free space" at work here. Leave it to Terraria to convince you, you understand how things work, and then prove you wrong.
I would greatly appreciate any feedback on my build or general advice you can give from your experience for making housing.
Did you know there is a TCF called "No More Wood Boxes"? Pshhh... I love boxes. Meow
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